Holy Imagination

My wife and I recently watched the C. S. Lewis movie, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe on DVD. It was our second viewing of the movie. I have a deep emotional attachment to the Narnia stories. I read them early in college. My wife and I read them and we spent hours discussing the books with friends. And I confess that I was moved to tears throughout the movie.

The story itself takes obvious hints from the Gospel. How else would one explain a character who is a lion sometimes referred to as a lamb, who died as an utterly innocent victim for a traitor and then comes back from the dead with enabling power for those who follow him? Lewis knew the power of stories to convey vital information. Apparently God is well aware of the power of story. Scripture, some say, is a bout 77% narrative. The Bible tells us the story of salvation and it is a true story, a historic story, a story that directs us to God himself. God used the story form because story reaches our souls in ways that a plain, declarative statement can’t. This is why we often fall asleep trying to read a theology book while the Bible itself keeps our attention. Story, like music, moves us deep in our soul.

Lewis’s story is fiction. It is a story that transcends itself and points us to a truth elsewhere. However, I am not claiming that Lewis is inspired or that his stories bear any resemblance in nature to Scripture. Like all good stories it awakens within us a longing for something that is more grand and powerful than the story itself. When I read the Narnia stories, I don’t want to meet the lion, I want to know Christ. His story awakes in me a deep desire to know Christ face to face. In the last pages of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, King Edmund said: “I don’t know how it is but this lamp on the post worketh upon me strangely. It runs in my mind that I have seen the like before; as it were a dream or in the dream of a dream.” This is what Lewis’s stories do to me, they whisper of far away places that seem to break in on me and leave me thirsty and hungry for more. And like a moth to a flame, I am drawn, not to the story, but to the whisper, to the reality behind it that is really too large for my imagination. All I can say now is it is “a new heaven and a new earth” and it whispers my name. The future intrudes into the present and calls ever so softly and it is as we I am dreaming a dream within a dream, something just beyond my grasp.

But there is also the darker side of the story. No one can read the experiences of Edmund or Eustace Scrubb and not sense his own hideous condition before God. When I read the stories, I am reminded of my own betrayal and treacherous behavior and yet God has loved me anyway. Very few stories do this. The only other literary form that does this, for me anyway, is a well crafted and well-preached sermon.

After the movie was over, I thought to myself, this moves me far more that most religious movies. The Passion of the Christ, as an example, moved me viscerally, but Lewis’s movie moved my underused imagination. God gave us imaginations, let us put it to holy use.